Demand for more performance in thin systems (e.g. smartphones and tablets) is increasing. The industry response to this demand has been the addition of more processor cores on processor chips to improve performance. The additional processor cores can provide higher performance, but the increase in processor cores results in the use of more power, which leads to higher temperatures and shorter battery life. Higher temperatures and shorter battery life negatively impact reliability and user experience.
Regardless of the number of processor cores, most user applications are still written so that processing is concentrated in just two cores (i.e., dual processor core intensive), hence adding more processor cores may not directly translate into better user experience/performance. For example, in a quad-processor system, two of the processor cores may not be used for process-intensive user applications. Further, the combination of processor cores selected for processing the user applications may not be the preferred processor cores for the applications.